Friday, June 22nd 2012
SSD Prices in Free-Fall: The Next DRAM?
Hard drive prices refuse to budge after last year's floods that struck manufacturing facilities in Thailand, even as manufacturers turn record profit. The solid-state drive market, on the other hand, is finally rolling with competition, high volume production, and advancements in NAND flash technologies. With memory majors such as Hynix adding new NAND flash manufacturing facilities to their infrastructure, SSD is expected to finally get its big break in the mainstream market.
SSD prices, according to price aggregators, are on a free-fall. Models which once held relative pricing as high as $2 per gigabyte, and going deep within the $1 mark. For example, Crucial's widely-praised M4 256 GB SSD has a price per GB of 'just' $0.82, and a market price around $200, something unheard of, for a 256 GB SSD with transfer rates of over 500 MB/s. With SSD major OCZ Technology releasing new generations of drives under the Vertex 4 and Agility 4 series that use Indilinx processors, older Vertex 3 and Agility 3 models are being phased out, some of these are seeing sub $1/GB prices. Intel is also responding to market trends, with prices of its SSD 520 series dropping sharply. Find a boat-load of stats at the source.
Source:
The TechReport
SSD prices, according to price aggregators, are on a free-fall. Models which once held relative pricing as high as $2 per gigabyte, and going deep within the $1 mark. For example, Crucial's widely-praised M4 256 GB SSD has a price per GB of 'just' $0.82, and a market price around $200, something unheard of, for a 256 GB SSD with transfer rates of over 500 MB/s. With SSD major OCZ Technology releasing new generations of drives under the Vertex 4 and Agility 4 series that use Indilinx processors, older Vertex 3 and Agility 3 models are being phased out, some of these are seeing sub $1/GB prices. Intel is also responding to market trends, with prices of its SSD 520 series dropping sharply. Find a boat-load of stats at the source.
120 Comments on SSD Prices in Free-Fall: The Next DRAM?
But I'm not going to argue with you anymore. You can believe what you want.
however, SSD's are certainly viable for HTPC's (no noise), and laptops (less fragile, faster can equal more power savings since the drive idles more).
I certainly noticed speed increases when i had my SSD, its just that it was never that big a deal. i use S3 sleep, so i had no long load times, no caches to rebuild, etc.
SSD's are getting better value, so now more people want them. its that simple.
I don't think an SSD is worth the price in a HTPC. My HTPC uses a completely silent 5400RPM laptop drive, or at least it is silent from my couch, and since I'm using sleep load times aren't anything to worry about.
I never said there weren't other benefits to SSDs, I just said they weren't worth the prices they currently go for, the benefits don't justify the cost in most cases and the money can usually be spent better elsewhere. A laptop is a different story, since there usually isn't a whole lot of other places to put the money. But even still, if I had to pick between two laptops, one with a SSD and the other with a higher resolution screen, I'm taking the higher resolution screen(and yes, I just had to make this decision).
In the meantime i'm perfectly fine pushing the start button on my computer and then reaching for a nice cold beverage to take a zip from, Ahh, Windows is done loading.:toast:
While some of the improvements indeed only shave seconds or fractions of seconds, I don't think that even the perceived performance boost is something we should dismiss.
it would only log me into a temp account :banghead: so it's been formatted since and had a firmware update
not put win 7 back on it yet:twitch:
as for the price i paid £300 for it or 467.65 US dollars, now a few months after buying it it's gone down to £209.99 or 327.34 US dollars :cry::(
i use S3 sleep rather than shutting it off, however.
And the fact that you're running RAID0 don't really demonstrate what others non-SSD users are experiencing on a SPINNING HDD either. Still, the more HDDs in raid the more delay you will have (access time). Games don't need massive bandwidth to load quickly. They need low access time, but SSD has both anyway.
Maybe you don't really play many multiplayer games with a lot of loading between matches, so a few seconds don't really bother you, but you're now the minority. Everything new that's coming out have mutliplayer component. Every match requires loading.
Without Windows nothing can run. Windows runs faster = programs itself run faster. I don't even need to mention the faster access time and higher bandwidth of the ssd.
I'm not exactly stupid to spend $250 (now it's just $150 and even faster) for an SSD that provides little performance. I did my homework. My SSD gives me more than what I expected, and I also had 5 HDDs in RAID0 before (now I have 3). I moved from that and I'm still impressed.
You're the only one who came back to spinning HDD after trying SSD as far as I know, and probably the only one in existence.
I only disagree with you and in your 1st post you called me delusional.
I had respects for you. Now it's lost. Your opinions are so strong you can't take anything else in.
Gotta empty your cup old man.
And about games, Deus Ex is one of the worst games with load times, and it literally takes 16 seconds to load from the main menu to playing the game. I can wait. I play plenty of multiplayer, the load times aren't bad, most of the time is syncing with the server anyway. But beyond that, if it is just going from match to match on the same server, it is either reloading the same map so the data is cached and loading is super fast, or I'm loaded in waiting for the next match to start or for other people to finish loading into the match.
Switching between different servers can cause a longer load time, but generally it is still under 10 seconds, so I can wait. Now your just grasping. Windows isn't helping apps run faster just because the OS is on an SSD, it doesn't work that way. The app is still on a mechanical hard drive, the data needed to run that app has to be loaded from the mechanical hard drive, so the app still loads just as slow with the SSD as without. Yes, yes you are that stupid. And now your are defending that purchase tooth and nail because there is no way anyone is going to tell you it wasn't a wise purchase. I personally would have upgrading the GTX480 instead but eh what would I know... Obviously I'm not. Actually, that would have been my second post, and you are delusional. But you can keep lying to yourself, if that's what makes you feel better about wasting money on an overprices SSD.
Better: Backup your important data on a regular basis.
Rock solid: RAID your backup.